Cincinnatus Wept
Civic virtue in Trump’s idiocracy.
It was both apt and ironic that the first stop on Donald Trump’s Victory Tour was in Cincinnati. Apt because Cincinnati is an anomaly — a city of decent size, east of the Mississippi, that is reliably reactionary. Founded by German Catholics and swamped by Masonic hillbillies, the two groups treated each other with suspicion until the Progressive Era when they agreed to agree that sex is disgusting and blacks are lazy. In 1990, it became the only city in the history of the republic to bring a museum up on criminal pornography charges for displaying the works of Robert Mapplethorpe.
The choice was ironic, on the other hand, because the city is named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman dictator celebrated for his civic virtue. Superficially, this might seem like another case of aptness, even a knowing wink from the President-elect. Cincinnatus was called from his farm to rule by his fellow patricians to put down a revolt of plebes seeking equal rights. Check and check.
By tradition, however, Cincinnatus is admired for his reluctant embrace of power. He was called from his farm to serve; once his remit was fulfilled he surrendered power and returned to his plow.
The leader who serves entirely for the sake of his country, devoid of personal pleasure, is an ideal as old as the Tao and, of course. Plato. In America, this ideal is personified by George Washington, who surrendered control of the Continental Army, refused to be monarch, and voluntarily resigned after two terms.
In this sense, Trump is the anti-Cincinnatus, though one wonders if he thinks so. If he were given to reflection — or historical curiosity — he might see himself as the virtuous Roman dictator, called from the private sector to save the public sphere. But the comparison would end there, for has anyone ever loved power more? If Cincinnatus purely served, and we’ve accepted that the modern politician must be a mixture of calling and personality disorder, Trump is the latter only. If he steps down voluntarily after eight years, as the law now requires, we will be lucky.
But across the river, in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, another would-be Cincinnatus is beginning his career. The Fourth, plopped across the state’s forebrow like Trump’s combover, was an early client of the GOP’s southern strategy — per the aforementioned agreement to direct mutual enmity elsewhere — going Republican in 1967 and staying that way, save the six-year reign of blue dog Democrat Ken Lucas (who — interestingly — honored his pledge to serve only three terms).
The seat is currently held by Thomas Massie, who might be more justified (than Trump, certainly) of imagining himself as Cincinnatus.
After growing up in West Virginia and Kentucky, Massie went to MIT and — with his future wife — founded and sold a nifty company that makes haptic feedback devices for 3D modeling environments. (You can see a boyish Massie demonstrating the technology in this video.)
This technological background has helped Massie’s name be bandied about for Trump’s science adviser — that along with the fact that he is willing to be skeptical about human contributions to climate change. (Though he lives in a solar-powered homestead of his own devising. “[T]o be on the safe side,” he has said. “I’ve got a thousand acres of trees on my property and I’m not going to cut them, even if that would be the profit-maximizing thing to do.”)
He identifies as a libertarian — except when it comes to intellectual property protection, for obvious reasons — and as a Tea Partier. Oh, and he loves guns. His biggest news hit since the election has been his reboot of the Second Amendment Caucus “to reverse the erosion of the Second Amendment that’s occurred over the last few decades.” Here is a picture that appeared in his most recent constituent newsletter.
Congressman Massie and I are of a similar vintage, both products — like the notorious Creation Museum — of Kentucky’s 4th congressional district. He, like I, has been to Rome. While we have profound disagreements, I do not think he is an idiot.
This was poignantly demonstrated yesterday as the Congressman, or perhaps some intern, attempted to make a nerdy point about electoral math on the Congressman’s Facebook page. Perhaps it was an intern, but it feels like the excited explanation of the young MIT grad we see in the video from his entrepreneurial days. No, no. We just have to analyze this. His point, completely valid as far as it goes, is that for the disproportionate representation of the Electoral College to be truly decisive, the margin of victory would have to be less than the 102 electors that are assigned — like Senators — without reference to population. Subtracting those, Trump still wins 56.4% of the electoral votes. Massie concludes:
The discrepancy between the popular vote result and the electoral college result, IN THIS RACE, is actually due to a high concentration of blue votes in blue states. Said differently, on average, Hillary Clinton won the blue states by a larger margin than Donald Trump won the red states. That is all.
That’s not to say the feature of the electoral college which protects small states hasn’t or won’t ever come into play. I’m just saying it wasn’t a factor this time.
As a fellow nerdy product of Kentucky’s 4th congressional district — a tough row to hoe, let me tell you — I was impressed with the Congressman’s attempt to speak seriously here, but also felt bound to note the sophistry. For it is not only the disproportionate allotment of electors that gives small states leverage, it’s also the winner-takes-all nature of state allotments, which produces the occasional — but increasingly frequent — result that the winner of the popular vote loses the Electoral College. Massie basically concedes this in explaining “the discrepancy between the popular vote result and the electoral college result” above.
If we were having coffee I think we could have agreed on our respective points in less than a minute.
Not so with his followers. The ensuing discussion was a revelation in seeing what we Romans — and our erstwhile neighbors like Congressman Massie — are dealing with.
Even though Donald Trump has won the Electoral College and will be inaugurated on January 20, Massie’s constituents seemed pathologically incapable of admitting the fact — admitted by Massie himself— that Trump did not win the popular vote. Like Trump himself, they cannot accept anything less than a complete landslide.
Their arguments ranged from the conspiratorial:
To the unintelligible:
To the merely furious:
Ultimately, I said I would agree that Trump won the popular vote if the Congressman clarified that this was his position, otherwise why argue on his page about something he and I agreed about? (He did not, of course, because it is not true.)
It was then that I began to pity Congressman Massie, this would-be Cincinnatus who returned from Rome to serve the people, only to find that these people could not even understand his clever parsing of the electoral situation. I could almost channel his sinking feeling as he understood that he had been empowered by people who could not appreciate his accomplishments or his virtues, that he had returned to Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, not as a hero, but as the king of the fools.
Would a true Cincinnatus, today, find enough left in the republic worth saving, or might he refuse the call and return directly to his plow, leaving the people to fend for themselves?
I think a lot of Romans — perhaps even Congressman Massie — are wondering that right now. I do not have an answer for him.
